Review/Opera: Atys; The Baroque, But Suffused With Eroticism

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: March 20, 1992

THE Sun King, it is said, saw himself as the hero of Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera "Atys" -- a young man affecting indifference to love while being consumed by its passions. The opera was a favorite of Louis XIV's; after its premiere in 1676, he had it performed again and again.

After a three-century eclipse, that work is now becoming another musical touchstone, thanks to the extraordinary talents of William Christie, who is currently bringing the opera to life at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Putting aside, for a moment, qualifications and caveats: this is one of the most extraordinary productions of Baroque opera I have ever seen or expect to see until the same principals collaborate on Charpentier's "Medee" in 1994. These performances are part of a three-year French Baroque project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music involving Mr. Christie; also included will be a concert performance of "Les Indes Galantes" by Rameau in 1993 as well as workshops and master classes. But in the meantime, "Atys" is achievement enough.

In fact, on Wednesday night, the music performed by Mr. Christie's early-instrument group, Les Arts Florissants, was so sensuously eloquent, and the stage direction of Jean-Marie Villegier so cogent and convincing, that this work was revealed as a masterpiece of expression and form. It is suffused with an almost painful eroticism, each recitative becoming a lyrical window onto a character's interior life. This was no mean achievement; Baroque operas are usually approached as a series of static set pieces, and are sadly relegated to the status of curiosities. This version was not so much a restoration of the work as a contemporary re-creation; its imaginative conceits were so powerful that it wasn't until late in the four-hour performance that I realized just how radical they were.

This is an opera about a young man, Atys, who falls in love with a nymph, Sangaride, daughter of the river god. But she is affianced to Celenus, a son of Neptune. And into this triangle comes yet another divine force, the goddess Cy bele, who is determined to claim Atys's love. The mythological universe is populated with gods of rivers and streams, bands of divinities of the woodlands, and corybantes cavorting in temples and on mountainsides.

Yet in this production (first presented in 1987 in Paris as a joint production of Il Teatro Communale di Firenze, L'Opera de Montpellier and L'Opera de Paris and brought to the academy once before, in 1989), Mr. Villegier sets the entire drama as if in a single room of Versailles; each wall of Carlo Tommasi's set seems formed of a single windowless slab of marble. The natural world is glimpsed only through open doors during one sequence dramatizing Atys's dream. The gods retain their names and powers but are dressed as elaborately bewigged noblemen. And though Atys comes to a tragic end, turned by Cybele into an evergreen that will never die, even the tree is represented only by sprigs of green, ceremonially carried by a chorus of woodland and water divinities, all of whom, in the Louis XIV costumes of black and gray designed by Patrice Cauchetier, look as if they have just stepped out of an audience with the King.

This was not, however, some denatured attempt at cleverness. The mythic natural setting of the original is simply a dramatic convention of the period and has little to do with the work's substance. Philippe Quinault's finely crafted libretto is actually courtly in its concerns. The characters wonder about whether to show indifference to one another rather than express their love, whether to dissemble about their feelings, whether duty takes precedence over passion, whether the social order takes priority over the private world of desire. Atys hides his love at first; then reveals it in caution. Even Cybele, a goddess, shows her love for Atys only through a dream, as if direct demonstration would upset convention. There is always concern about the form of expression.

The opera is an opera of manners, not of myth, and this is true even in the music. Lully did not write immense formal declamations or elaborately ornamented arias. This is not grandly public music of pomp and significance. Its drama is based upon recitatives, melodic sighs, courtly dances and arias that are less melodies than poised expressions of sentiment. Mr. Christie, who is a master of this repertory, treated the music on Wednesday so it emerged without a jagged edge. The continuo lines were often performed by viols and lutes, making them lyrical elaborations of harmonies. The music seemed as preoccupied with formality and passion as the characters. The rhythm was never slack but also never brittle; the playing was shaped in breaths and the movements on stage matched its phrasing.

There was something almost ceremonial about this. With choreography by Francine Lancelot, the dance group Ris et Danceries created elaborate ballets based on Baroque models, but gesture and dance suffuse even the singers' movements. When a character is both attracted by something and wary of it, when desire seeks release but manners forbid it, the character, with hand outstretched as if reaching for something, slowly moves backward. Entrances are choreographed; no sudden movement breaks the music's phrasing.

The formal character of gesture and music make the pained expressions of secret love all the more sensuous and affecting (aided by English supertitles). There are two casts performing the work this weekend; the cast I saw, which overlaps with both Mr. Christie's refined Harmonia Mundi recording of "Atys," and with the performance I saw at the academy in 1989, was a company rather than an assemblage of soloists. Howard Crook was an exceptionally fine Atys, gracious and riven by his inner life. Guillemette Laurens, as Cybele, was both authoritative and plangent. Her aria "Espoir si cher et si doux," with its sighs and dying falls, could almost be the representative expression of the entire opera: "Love, who beguiled me, concealed his torments from me/Now I see that it was to afflict me with his most painful blows."

There are some problems with the production: the post-modern gimcrackery of the prologue is both too busy and too coy in tone for the fervent sincerity of most of the opera; the production's manners at times become overly precious. I also found Bernard Deletre's campy river god Sangarius distracting; and the motions of Alecton, Cybele's agent from Hades, were cliched in their hocus-pocus manipulations. But these were mere details.

The culmination of this tragedy, in which so much is sung about detachment and feeling, about dissembling and expression, is that the two lovers, Atys and Sangaride, finally reveal too much. Without cloaks of detachment, they abandon themselves to "sweet rapture" and are watched by the jealous goddess. Her punishment is to bring Atys into a state of ultimate dissemblance: madness. He stabs, unknowingly, his greatest love. But his revenge is then more telling: he kills himself, so Cybele will be left in a state of unrequited longing.

One listener of the period saw this mortal's death as an indictment of the godlike powers of the King; this production made the tragedy more generous and more abstract. Lully would not have recognized it, but like the Sun King, we see in it both Lully and ourselves.